Christie Could Face Narrower Straits, Even After Bridge Scandal Passes

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie enters the Borough Hall in Fort Lee to apologize to Mayor Mark Sokolich last week.

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So is he toast? Has the bridge scandal dashed Chris Christie’s 2016 dreams? Or might the New Jersey governor emerge from all this a firmer front-runner for having been tested?

Truth is, no one can say, as much could still scramble what we know now about the weird “bridge-gate” that has convulsed the political class.

But this much seems certain: Gov. Christie and his political image have been altered by the past week’s turmoil in ways—subtle and otherwise—that will ripple long after the facts have been settled.

By necessity, the governor himself will be more circumscribed and more cautious. His margin for error will be narrower, as will the range of themes he can freely deploy during an upcoming presidential campaign, should he decide to leap into the 2016 fray.

A quick scan of the political blogs and Twitter shows another shift that will do Mr. Christie little good in the months ahead: Where once he was the subject of fairly doting coverage, he is now the butt of bullying jokes. Where once he boasted of his bipartisan bonhomie with the Democrats in New Jersey, there is now talk in the statehouse of impeachment.

The range of opinion on the damage done to Mr. Christie so far remains wide, even among conservatives. Several prominent Republicans rose to the governor’s defense this weekend, arguing that the swiftness and firmness of his response on Thursday restored confidence in his leadership.

Then there’s the school that believes Mr. Christie may emerge stronger from the battle, among them veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove, GOP chairman Reince Priebus and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

The governor’s scrappy defense, Mr. Rove said Sunday on Fox News, “probably gives him some street cred with tea party Republicans who say, ‘That’s what we want in a leader.’ ”

But far from all Republicans are so rosy in their views. Two of Mr. Christie’s potential 2016 rivals, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have made a show of not wanting to wade into the controversy.

Conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh argue that Mr. Christie kneecapped himself right before the 2012 presidential election, when he embraced President Barack Obama amid the wreckage of Superstorm Sandy.

Others take a more nuanced view.

Among that school is Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA political science professor who has done a lot of work on what does and doesn’t ruin the aspirations of presidential hopefuls. Ms. Vavreck co-wrote “The Gamble,” a data-driven analysis of the 2012 presidential campaign that found most of the big game-change moments—Mitt Romney’s 47% video, for instance, or President Obama’s abysmal first debate performance—were mere blips against the bigger forces driving that election.

Interestingly, Ms. Vavreck believes Mr. Christie won’t get off scot-free from his run-in with the George Washington Bridge.

“Even if this passes quickly with no more revelations, a bunch of campaign topics just got wiped off the table for him,” she says. “He can’t ever talk proactively again about transportation, infrastructure-building, even probably anything like ‘making it easier for Americans to carry out the day-to-day activities they need to get by.’ ”

In Ms. Vavreck’s view, Mr. Christie has been thematically limited by the bridge scandal. “He, for example, cannot be the ‘Rebuild America’ candidate for 2016,” she says.

We can expect a stream of national polls in coming weeks to give us a better sense of whether Mr. Christie has taken a real blow from the first big political whodunnit of the 2016 presidential race.

But even that data won’t capture the many small ways the bridge imbroglio could continue to cast a shadow on Gov. Christie.

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